Gabriel García Márquez

by Ilan Stavans

  Vinyes moved to Barranquilla in 1914, and, in partnership with another Catalan immigrant, Xavier Auqué i Masdeu, opened the bookstore Librería Ramón Vinyes y Cía. Known as a superb anfitrión, a host and erudite entertainer, he was an amicable, entertaining host to his clientele, always recommending new books.

  In Europe, World War I was raging. At the time, Barranquilla had a population of approximately one hundred thousand. It was a thriving, if chaotic, city. Vinyes’s bookstore became a watering hole for artists and intellectuals. Soon, with the backing of friends and supporters, Vinyes launched a literary magazine, Voces, which quickly made a name for itself both in Colombia and the rest of Latin America. In Barranquilla, people referred to the publication as “la revista de Vinyes,” Vinyes’s magazine. Contributors included Julio Gómez de Castro, José Félix Fuenmayor (father of Alfonso Fuenmayor), Rafael Carbonell, and Enrique Restrepo. Its approach was liberal, cosmopolitan, and democratic: “We battle against the negative, against those that find darkness in the work of art when darkness resides in them; against those that don’t accept any other manifestation of sensibility but their own, narrow and dark.” The magazine folded in 1920.

  It isn’t known exactly when García Márquez met Vinyes, but the encounter probably took place between September 1948 and June 1949, while García Márquez was in Barranquilla. Vinyes wrote in his diary: “A good Colombian storyteller. Gabriel García Márquez. ‘La otra orilla de la muerte’ is a good story. A brother whose twin has just died. Nightmare, end of story. He has died of a tumor. The putrid matter will reach the one alive. They complemented each other. The story is strong. A rainy night. A leak in the middle of the bedroom, with a drop that falls insistently. A scent of violets and formaldehyde. The persistent nightmare. Pus, night, philosophy.”18

  In the early twenties, Vinyes went back and forth between Barranquilla and Barcelona. He married a Colombian woman, María Salazar. His bookstore mysteriously burned down. Rather than rebuilding it, he took the opportunity to switch careers and began writing editorials and reviews for the newspaper La Nación. He continued writing for the theater. In September 1948, Vinyes met Alfonso Fuenmayor and Germán Vargas Cantillo, who idolized him. They enjoyed many conversations, mostly in La Cueva, which Vinyes recorded in his diaries. Fuenmayor said, “Vinyes came from rejecting the dull Spanish poetry revolving around Rubén Darío’s modernism. He could cite in their respective languages the Latin classics as well as Chaucer, Rabelais, Boccaccio, Villon, Auden or a buffoon from the Middle Ages. He knew where William Blake’s madness began and why Picasso had not continued painting boxes for the raisins; he could distinguish fourteen thousand shades of green and he noticed when the mayonnaise had an extra drop of oil.”19 Vinyes was a relentless dissident who embraced the ideas of the enlightenment while questioning their ideological dogmas.

  Vinyes is credited with reintroducing García Márquez to Joyce, among other writers. García Márquez once said that whatever El sabio catalán recommended to him, he would devour.20 To the extent possible, Vinyes followed the careers of his friends. In 1950, García Márquez, Cepeda Samudio, Vargas Cantillo, and Alfonso Fuenmayor launched the magazine Crónica. In Living to Tell the Tale, García Márquez relates: “For me, Crónica had the later importance of allowing me to improvise emergency stories to fill unexpected spaces in the anguish of going to press. I would sit at the typewriter while linotypists and typesetters did their work, and out of nothing I would invent a tale the size of the space. This is how I wrote ‘How Natanael Pays a Visit,’ which solved an urgent problem for me at dawn, and ‘Blue Dog’s Eyes,’ five weeks later.”21 Unfortunately, no copies of Crónica seem to have survived. The magazine was quite important in his growth as a writer. For eight months it featured a foreign short story, often translated from the French by García Márquez. And it was in Crónica where he wrote an early piece, published in 1950, called “La casa de los Buendía” (The Buendía House), in which he first presented some of the material he would later develop in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

  In the article “El cuento del cuento,” García Márquez revealed that his friend Cepeda Samudio, just before dying, gave him the plot of Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Don Ramón Vinyes told him: “Cuéntala mucho . . . Es la única manera de saber lo que una historia tiene por dentro” (Tell it many times over . . . It’s the only way to know what a story has in its insides).22 Vinyes himself died on May 5, 1952. His influence and that of El grupo de Barranquilla on García Márquez is undeniable. Thirteen years later, when García Márquez sat down to write the expanded version of La casa, he included, in chapter nineteen, a humorous tribute to El sabio catalán and the folks of El grupo de Barranquilla, in which the last Aureliano meets the real-life characters: One afternoon Aureliano “went to the bookstore of the wise Catalan and found four ranting boys in a heated argument about the methods used to kill cockroaches in the Middle Ages. The old bookseller, knowing about Aureliano’s love for books that had been read only by the Venerable Bede, urged him with a certain fatherly malice to get into the discussion.” What follows is a disquisition on the cockroach’s survival mechanism throughout history, a message that resonates in a novel concerned with the durability of a species: the Buendías.

  The narrative then focuses on Aureliano’s friendship with the group. “Aureliano continued getting together in the afternoon with the four arguers, whose names were Álvaro, Germán, Alfonso, and Gabriel, the first and last friends that he ever had in his life. For a man like him, holed up in written reality, those stormy sessions that began in the bookstore and ended at dawn in the brothels were a revelation. It had never occurred to him until then to think that literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people, as Álvaro demonstrated during one night of revelry. Some time would have to pass before Aureliano realized that such arbitrary attitudes had their origins in the example of the Catalan wise man, for whom wisdom was worth nothing if it could not be used to invent a new way of preparing chick peas.”23

  The use of the “plaything,” (in the Spanish original, “que la literatura fuera el mejor juguete que se había inventado para burlarse de la gente”) appears to mirror Cervantes’s narrative strategy in his satire of chivalry novels, in which few of his contemporaries emerge without a kick in the butt. Similarly, the tantalizing mise en abysme of García Márquez’s scene (where he refers to himself), in which fictional characters interact with real people, echoes the recurrent metaliterary devices in Don Quixote. Among them, in Part II, are the moments in which the knight and his squire encounter people who have either read or heard about Part I and who compare the flesh-and-blood Don Quixote and Sancho with their literary counterparts. The essence of this playfulness is the art of being a mamador de gallos: not to take any aspect of life, no matter how serious, without cracking a joke.24

  When García Márquez moved to Cartagena de Indias, he knew his own career as a student was at an impasse, maybe even at an end. His dream of becoming a writer occupied most of his attention, and journalism was intimately connected to it. “Journalism keeps you in contact with reality,” García Márquez stated in 1982. “Literary people have a tendency to take all sorts of detours into unreality. Besides, if you stick to writing only books, you’re always starting from scratch all over again.”25 To write and to do it well and under a deadline suited his aspirations. Plus, how else could he make ends meet?

  In Cartagena, García Márquez had a fortuitous street encounter with the writer and doctor Manuel Zapata Olivella, who took him to the editorial offices of El Universal, a liberal newspaper founded just a few months earlier, in March 1948, by Domingo López Escauriaza. The offices were in the Plaza de San Pedro, on the corner of Calle San Juan. In May, García Márquez started writing a column called “Punto y aparte.” These pieces were produced rapidly. They had a poetic quality to them, and they explored the enchanting, thought-provoking elements of daily life that would capture a reader’s attention. In total, he wrote forty
columns, the last one at the end of 1949.26

  García Márquez led a bohemian life during his Cartagena years. He spent his evenings at the office, his nights in bars getting drunk with close friends, and his dawns in whore-houses. As a reporter, he needed to be able to move around, talk to people, and navigate Cartagena’s treacherous neighborhoods, from the poorest to the most luxurious. He not only covered the city, he turned it into a larger home of sorts. With the exception of Aracataca and its tangible influence on the shaping of Macondo’s mythical qualities, the Colombian place that is easiest to recognize—and to celebrate—in García Márquez’s fiction is Cartagena. In his view, it was a place to experiment with the possibilities of love. For instance, at the Paseo de los Mártires he had spent the night sleeping on a bench while drunk when a biblical deluge soaked him to the bone. He caught a terrible case of pneumonia, spent a couple of weeks in the hospital, and was given a heavy dose of antibiotics, which, as he relates in Living to Tell the Tale, were said to have atrocious side-effects, such as early impotence. In his memoir, García Márquez recalls the Torre del Reloj, a bridge that in ancient times linked the Old City with a poor neighborhood known as Getsemaní, and the Plaza de los Coches, the site of a slave market in the colonial period, a reference that appears in Of Love and Other Demons. In his newspaper columns García Márquez often wrote about the Plaza de la Aduana, where there is a church that houses the remains of the Spanish priest Pedro Claver, who the people of Cartagena consider a saint.

  In 1953, García Márquez worked as a book salesman. It allowed him to travel around the Magdalena River area and the Guajira peninsula. The following year, he returned to Bogotá and became a staff writer at El Espectador, where he started writing entre cachacos, that is, for Bogotá readers. It appears that his job at the newspaper resulted from a visit García Márquez paid to Álvaro Mutis, then in charge of the publicity department at Esso, located on Avenida Jiménez. The offices of El Espectador were in the same building. His first surviving piece, dated February 1954, is a review of various movies, including Testimonio de una amante, starring Edward G. Robinson and Paulette Goddard. Whenever the newspaper was short on redactores, or news writers, his colleagues asked him to write a few words. He complied with pleasure. But García Márquez was planning to return to the Atlantic coast. Before he could do so, the newspaper editors offered him a full-time job for a monthly salary of 900 pesos. That was more money than he received at El Heraldo, so he decided to stay. He would be able to live better, and he wanted to send his parents some money.

  In El Espectador, he helped with the daily section, Día a día. What distinguished García Márquez’s work was the emphasis he placed on film criticism, a fledgling exercise in Colombia and Latin America. But the most exciting aspect, in terms of his literary development, was his interest in reportage. His desire to use his journalistic tools to produce expansive nonfiction pieces capable of looking objectively at a phenomenon in its entirety without sacrificing the stylistic component—in the fashion of New Journalists such as Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, and Norman Mailer in the United States in the sixties and seventies—convinced García Márquez that newspaper serials would bring him more satisfaction than his regular dispatch.

  In 1955 a terrific story—not without ideologically explosive elements—about the shipwreck of a Colombian vessel and the life at sea of the sole survivor, magically fell on his lap. García Márquez’s story, serialized in fourteen consecutive issues, was a sensation. He had by far the most readers in his life, and he and the serial received a great deal of attention.

  A decade and a half later, while living in Barcelona, García Márquez wrote: “February 28, 1955, brought the news that eight crew members of the destroyer Caldas, of the Colombian Navy, had fallen overboard and disappeared during a storm in the Caribbean Sea. The ship was sailing from Mobile, Alabama, in the United States, where it had docked for repairs, to the Colombian port of Cartagena, where it arrived two hours after the tragedy. A search for the seamen began immediately, with the cooperation of the U.S. Panama Canal Authority, which performs such functions as military control and other humanitarian deeds in the southern Caribbean.”27 The search went on for four days. Then it was abandoned. A week later, Luis Alejandro Velasco washed ashore on the beaches of northern Colombia. He had survived on a raft for ten days.

  The sequence of events was established by the various sources involved. Velasco became a media darling. General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla’s government used him as an emblem of courage. The nation was curious about and enchanted by this survivor, and Velasco began to profit financially from his story. He was hired by an agency to sell watches because his own watch didn’t malfunction. And he was contracted to promote a line of shoes because, again, his own shoes held up during the ordeal.

  Public curiosity about Velasco dwindled. At which point, the sailor showed up on his own accord at El Espectador, offering to sell his full story. Everyone was skeptical, mainly because it seemed that the fellow was so hungry for attention that he was capable of inventing anything in order to get it. The survivor’s offer was declined. Velasco left and by sheer chance, he and Guillermo Cano were going down the newspaper building’s staircase at the same time. They spoke and Cano changed his mind. He asked García Márquez to do an extensive interview with the shipwrecked sailor. Not only was the reporter available, he was known to have a sweet and patient way with interviewees.

  As the dialogue between reporter and survivor unfolded, García Márquez realized that what he had was a treasure. He explained: “My first surprise was that this solidly built twenty-year-old, who looked more like a trumpet player than a national hero, had an exceptional instinct for the art of narrative, an astonishing memory and ability to synthesize, and enough uncultivated dignity to be able to laugh at his own story.”28

  He and Velasco met over twenty sessions of six hours each. García Márquez tried to poke holes in his story. He was fascinated by the complexity of the tale, which was “so detailed and so exciting that my only concern was finding readers who would believe it. Not only for that reason but because it seemed fitting, we agreed that the story would be written in the first person and signed by him.”29 Only when the report-age was published in book form was García Márquez’s name attached to it.

  There were more surprises in stock. At one point, García Márquez asked Velasco to talk about the storm, but the sailor replied that there had been no storm. Subsequently, García Márquez learned that it wasn’t a storm that had caused the disaster but heavy winds that tossed the ship’s cargo and its eight sailors into the sea. But the ship might have withstood the winds had it not been for the weight of its cargo. What was it carrying? García Márquez discovered that the ship was transporting black market goods: refrigerators, television sets, washing machines, etc. Army ships were not allowed to take such merchandise from the United States to Colombia.

  When García Márquez’s story was published in El Espectador, there was enormous interest. General Rojas Pinilla’s government was initially enthusiastic—until the revelations about the illegal cargo and other embarrassing details began to appear. The newspaper managed to find some of the other sailors and asked for permission to print some of the photographs the sailors had taken with their own cameras. The publication of those images brought ridicule upon Rojas Pinilla’s administration. The sailor’s courage in the struggle against nature had become, in the public imagination, about contraband and government corruption. The initial exhilaration had given place to deceit.

  García Márquez was in a tight bind. His life was in jeopardy. To protect him, the newspaper dispatched him to Europe as a correspondent. In Latin America there is a long tradition of sending persecuted intellectuals, artists, dissidents, and diplomats abroad. Sometimes these trips are organized hastily. This one was meticulously planned. García Márquez was already in Europe when he found out that the offices of El Espectador had been shut down.

  García
Márquez’s story about the shipwrecked sailor was published as a book by Tusquets in 1970. He said that he had not read the story in fifteen years and that the request to bring it out between two covers came from an editor. “I have never quite understood the usefulness of publishing it,” he stated in the preface, which was entitled “The Story of This Story.” “I find it depressing that the publishers are not so much interested in the merit of the story as in the name of the author, which, much to my sorrow, is also that of a fashionable writer. If it is now published in the form of a book, that is because I agreed without thinking about it very much, and I am not a man to go back on his word.”30 He added: “There’s not a single invented detail in the whole account. That’s what’s so astonishing. If I had invented that story I would have said so, and been very proud of it, too. I interviewed that boy from the Colombian navy—as I explain in my introduction to the book—and he told me his story in minute detail. As his cultural level was only fair he didn’t realize the extreme importance of many of the details he told me spontaneously, and was surprised at my being so struck by them. By carrying out a form of psychoanalysis I helped him remember things—for instance, a seagull he saw flying over his raft—and in that way we succeeded in reconstructing his whole adventure. It came out with a bang! The idea had been to publish the story in five or six installments in El Espectador but by about the third of the way there was so much enthusiasm among the readers, and the circulation of the paper had increased so enormously, that the editor said to me, ‘I don’t know how you’re going to manage but you must get at least twenty installments out of this.’ So then I set about enriching every detail.”31